


Breaking Point

by Wolfram_Hart



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Angst with a hint of fluff at the end?, Head Auror Harry Potter, Healers, M/M, Major Character Injury, Married Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter, really just a hint though
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-09
Updated: 2020-06-14
Packaged: 2020-06-25 04:37:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19738456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wolfram_Hart/pseuds/Wolfram_Hart
Summary: Harry is off chasing a wizarding murderer who is plotting to kill him.Again.And Draco? Draco is fine. Totally awesome. This is exactly what he was hoping for from married life, and anyone accusing him of living on the edge of a permanent anxiety breakdown is... well, clearly delusional themselves. If Harry hasn’t noticed, it can hardly be a real problem, can it?[A married Draco/Harry falling apart from the inside.]





	1. Chapter 1

Draco spends a lot of time anxiously waiting for floo calls. One time he was perched on his chair by the fire long enough that he read the entirety of the Ministry pamphlet _Safeguarding Important Wizards and Witches: a forty-eight step process._ Really it could have been summarised in a memo with three bullet points:  
  
1\. The Head Auror is notoriously a target, and far too valuable to risk out in the field.  
  
2\. The Boy-Who-Lived aka Harry James Potter aka our Grand Saviour should never be placed in danger. The backlash against the Ministry if he was lost would be… near catastrophic.  
  
3\. No one on the Ministry’s _Very Important Wizards & Witches _list should be involved in extreme-risk cases. These include, but are not limited to: serial killers, ex-Death Eaters and conspiracies formed by radical fringe groups.  
  
But when Pansy tells Draco that an Auror left in pursuit of the ex-Death Eater fringe-group serial killer, he knows exactly who it is before Pansy has to tell him. His first, ridiculous thought is s _hould I give the ministry a copy of their pamphlet? I seem to be the only one who has read it._  
  
It’s not like the Ministry wouldn’t know of the danger of the killer, of the wreckage he is leaving behind. Draco has seen the bloody attacks splashed across newspaper pages the past month along with everyone else. He has watched how Harry freezes when he sees them, and then goes into work earlier, stays later. There are nights Harry comes home and shuffles into their bed at 2AM, injured, and nights - worse - when he comes back safe because he hasn’t managed to find anyone to fight. On those nights he barely responds to Draco’s questions: _how was work, how was your day, shall I tell you about mine?_ And he is gone by the time Draco leaves for work at 7.  
  
But Draco refuses, _refuses_ , to take today’s newspaper out and look at the corpses the killer leaves, knowing Harry has gone off-book to chase him, alone.   
  
Pansy looks like she’d like to reach a hand to touch his at the table, but that’s not how their friendship has ever worked. Instead she sets her teacup on the saucer decisively. “You need to stop him.”  
  
“Harry? He’ll be fine. He’s the best dueller of our generation. I’m sure he took a couple of other Aurors with him.” Inside Draco thinks: Back-up? What’s back-up? Only that useful thing you don’t realise you need until it’s too late.  
  
Pansy glares at him.  
  
“Pans, I know you think I always worry but-”  
  
“Because you’re sweating. You’re paler than even a Malfoy should be. And you’re about to break the teaspoon you’ve forgotten you’re holding.” He carefully unclenches his fingers and returns the spoon to the table. Right. Uncommonly powerful deduction skills, Pansy has.  
  
“And,” Pansy adds, “you were planning to present at the Edinburgh conference after this tea, and you seem to have forgotten it entirely.”  
  
Sure, she could have a point. But Draco? _Draco_ is fine. He’s safe in his own home, behind strong wards, drinking tea with one of his oldest chums. They’d be no point torturing Draco for information, because he doesn’t know squat about his husband’s whereabouts. He is possibly one of the safest men in Britain, right now.  
  
“I knew what this would be like when I married him.” Except Draco hadn’t. He’d thought… Merlin it sounds stupid now, even in his head, but he’d thought maybe he could help hold Harry back from the edge.  
  
Draco had thought, like a fool, that when Harry heard the words _till death do us part_ , he’d know someone cared more than anything. He’d thought it would be enough.  
  
Pansy has an uncomfortable look on her face that on anyone else he’d call sympathy.  
  
“I’m _fine_ ,” he insists. “But if you’re so tired of my perfectly calm state - and of course I’m not sweating, Pans, Malfoys don’t sweat - then why don’t you go back to work and I’ll just rest up here. Harry will be home, eventually, he always is.”  
  
Pansy, with much grumbling and slow final sips of her tea, departs.  
  
Draco wouldn’t say that he falls to pieces, after she leaves. Not quite.  
  
Whatever it was, after ten minutes, he pulls himself together. Casts a few fixing charms on the items in the room, and a cleaning charm on his own shirt. He won’t think like that. He _can’t_ , even in his own head. It will… it will be too much. _Near catastrophic_ , wrote the Ministry, and that’s how it feels to Draco now, that he is near catastrophe.  
  
He apparates to St Mungo’s to stop himself thinking, and asks them to prepare a room. The bemused secretary directs him to a healers office he has not visited before.  
  
He’d hoped he’d be able to speak to Healer Grey, who seemed to understand a little of the situation. Draco knew that if he had a room already prepared, he could quietly floo Harry into it and not cause a fuss. Otherwise Harry refused to come to St Mungo’s for all but the most life-threatening injuries, when he was unconscious and his Aurors brought him unknowingly. Harry hated how the press latched onto it, speculating about how close to death Harry was and how their whole society would fall apart in minutes. ( _You’d all do fine without me_ , Harry had insisted on seeing those articles, and Draco thought, _I wouldn’t._ But maybe Harry needed to tell himself he wasn’t worth much, to keep taking the risks he believed were needed).  
  
So it is Draco who asks Healers weirdly specific questions about injuries he doesn’t have, so he can try, and Merlin he has to _try_ , to save Harry some pain. He knows he hasn’t done enough to lessen the long-term damage accumulating with each poorly-healed curse.  
  
This time he truly regrets not checking the Healer’s name as he enters the office. Because here, behind an official Healer’s desk, is Katie Bell.  
  
After the war Draco had apologised to almost everyone he had hurt. He even told Hagrid how sorry he was about Buckbeak, because it wasn’t a Death Eater act but it was still a really shitty one.  
  
But Katie Bell… he didn’t have the words. He’d tried anyway of course, sent a letter to her after he was acquitted, apologising, offering recompense in whatever form she wanted to ask for. In his mind, he owed her a life debt, even if the magic didn’t take like that. But she had been out of the country, and never replied. By the look on her face right now, either she hadn’t got his letter, or she _really_ hadn’t been convinced.  
  
“Are you in immediate danger?” she asks, voice utterly cool.  
  
“Not me. But Ha-”  
  
“Then get out.”  
  
Draco does.  
  
***  
  
Three days later, with no word from his husband, Draco finally takes up camp at the Ministry. He has already contacted everyone he knows or knows how to threaten. He has stalked Knockturn Alley, has attempted to re-infiltrate the edges of the pureblood-leaning crowd and he even convinced Zabini to subtly probe the men he was sleeping with for information.  
Nothing.  
  
Well, that’s not true. Glimpses. But nothing that can bring his husband home safe.  
  
Harry could be investigating covertly, too rushed with the adrenalin of the chase to figure out a means of contact, or he could be dying in the corner of some dark alley, too broken to call for help.  
  
Every moment Harry is gone, both possibilities exist. Like Schrodinger’s cat: _dead or alive_. Until he finds out, Harry could be alive. Draco almost doesn’t want to look inside the box.  
  
But also every moment Harry is gone, Draco pictures him dead. And not the deaths he had nightmares about before, which, he realises now, were a gift. Now he sees Harry like the gruesome corpses in the _Prophet_ , bodies slack-faced from _crucio_ after _crucio_ , their limbs hacked away, their eyeballs and belly-buttons gutted out until they were a congealed mass of flesh.  
  
He doesn’t try sleeping. Dreamless Sleep potion hasn’t worked for him since the overdose, and the alternative is worse. Pepper-up is almost the same as sleep, anyway.  
  
So he goes to the Ministry. He sits in the corridor next to Weasley’s Auror office, because he knows news will reach there first, long before they think to contact him. One time Weasley informed _Neville_ that Harry had survived his mission before he told Draco. Apparently, _“_ old habits die hard”. Draco and Harry had only been engaged then, but little changed after the wedding. Gryffindor loyalties remain.  
  
Hermione was the only one who ever seemed to understand. They used to catch eyes and half-smiles, waiting in the corridors of the Ministry for their partners. Both of them young, war-damaged, and on edge every time their Auror boyfriends stepped outside. But since she became pregnant with Rose a year ago, Weasley confined himself to office work.  
  
When Draco saw Rose just days after she was born, Merlin she had looked so wonderful and smelled so innocent, he had asked Harry if Harry would do the same as Ron, if they ever adopted.  
  
Harry had looked desperately sad, for just a second. His voice cracked when he said, “I don’t seek _out_ danger.”  
  
And Draco had been left to fill in the rest. That danger found Harry anyway (though Harry _did_ seek it out, and denying it had been cruel, really. Harry just hadn’t wanted to say: _I chose the wizarding world over you._ As if Draco couldn’t have coped, or something.)  
  
So Draco can’t even bear the thought of adopting, because he can only promise the kid one parent, and that parent is so constantly, stiflingly anxious about the other that he’s not sure there’s room to let in anything else.  
  
Draco won’t be letting that out today. He is always careful how he speaks in the Auror office. This is not, he knows, his domain. So he sits quietly, and doesn’t let himself breathe too fast, or think too hard, or cast a _muffliato_ and then scream.  
  
Then Hermione (she asked him to call him by her first name early; Weasley never offered) comes barraging into the office through Weasley’s office floo. Draco spots her through the glass door and bursts through the door himself, shutting it tight behind him.  
  
“Your galleon!” Hermione is shouting at Weasley. “Mine heated up - did yours - can we?”  
  
Weasley fumbles in his jacket pocket, reaches out his galleon. Hermione had modified them so full messages could be sent wandlessly. When Hermione and Weasley put theirs side by side any secret messages Harry sends will appear (Harry said it would protect Draco not to be involved. Draco… has opinions on that).  
  
Weasley and Hermione bend their heads together to read the galleon. He strides over and shoves between them to take a look at it. He is done with caring whether it is rude.  
  
 **In his lair. Setting him up. Will call if properly injured.**  
  
Oh Merlin **.** In the murderer’s _lair_? That was such a - it was the most Potter plan imaginable. Aggravate the enemy until he tries to kill you, and maybe you’ll get him mid torture.  
  
“Properly injured,” Draco finds himself saying it as he thinks it, even though he is supposed to stay quiet. “That means he is already somewhat injured.”  
  
“He’ll tell us if it gets too much,” Ron says, sounding altogether reasonable.   
  
Fuck reason. “You’re not pulling him out?” Draco asks.  
  
“We trust him,” Weasley says simply, as if that is all this was, a question of _trust._  
  
“But-”

Hermione speaks calmly and slowly over him, as if to a child. “Harry’s one of the best. He wouldn’t appreciate being pulled off the chase.”  
  
“I know he’s the best they have. I just…” _don’t think he should risk his life every weekend._ Draco can see Weasley growing irate, his neck reddening to match his hair.  
  
“The people Harry is saving are important,” Hermione says, like Draco doesn’t care at all about the rest of the world.  
  
“I know they’re important, I just think some back up or support would be-”  
  
Weasley finally explodes. “You need to ruddy well support him!” he almost-shouts. Hermione places a hand on her arm, but she looks angry too.  
  
“Ron’s just frustrated, Draco,” she says. “We are all are. Though _really_ ,” and she sounds strangely like McGonagall. “A little support wouldn’t go amiss.”  
  
 _Fucking hell._  
  
And then in a quick rush before Draco can break every one of his rules about silencing himself in the Auror’s office, Harry appears in the office. He is grasping a portkey in his right hand, _crucio-_ ed to an inch of life. _It’s some kind of coma_ , Hermione says, speaking rapidly while casting twenty dozen diagnosing charms, but Draco’s too busy looking at Harry’s left arm and casting fast, exhausting, blood-replenishing and curse-weakening spells at what used to be an arm but is now some kind of stump, and Weasley is yelling orders at the other Aurors and Draco vomits in the corner of Weasley’s office while they all apparate away from him.  
  
Finally, he is done expelling everything he’s eaten and he steadies his head enough to apparate to Mungo’s, alone, to track his husband’s broken body once again.  
  



	2. Chapter 2

  
St Mungo’s is a hellish place if all you have to do is wait. Draco sits by Harry’s bedside as a conveyor belt of friends, admirers and colleagues come to visit.  
  
Some give Draco concerned looks, others glares, and the rest just ignore him as a fixture of the room. It’s a coma, and then deep, Healer-induced sleep, so there’s nothing to see, really.  
  
Not that that stops Draco watching for Harry’s every muscle twinge for five days straight.  
  
At one point the waiting becomes so awful that he goes to Healer Bell’s office. Listening to her blame him over and over might shut up the voice in his head that blames himself; he’s contrary like that.  
  
They do not even start with small talk.  
  
“What a delight to see you Malfoy. Of course, I’m busy, but how could that mean anything to you?”  
  
“You’re busy and yet he’s still lying there, isn’t he Bell?”  
  
“Maybe you should apply your own extensive curse knowledge. Wasn’t it one of your friends who cast -?”  
  
“Don’t you dare- _._ ”  
  
“I know what you deserve, _Malfoy,_ ” Bell spits his name.  
  
“I know. Look, of course I know… There is almost no one on this earth that could deserve Harry. And I’m in the bottom five bloody percentile.”  
  
“Oh, I’d say you’re worse than that.”  
  
“But I know you care, Bell, it’s clear you do.”  
  
“ _Healer_ Bell.”  
  
Draco raises his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Healer Bell,” he says and it comes out like a plea.  
  
She softens by the tiniest margin. “I’m involved in long-term recovery. What they’re working on now isn’t my expertise. There’s nothing I can do to help him.”  
  
“But you can help him. Long-term. Harry - Harry _fucking sucks_ at recovery. And he always manages to persuade the healers to let him get away with it. After this,” if there is an after this, but Draco’s not thinking that, not thinking at all, “would you…?”  
  
“Would I _what_?”  
  
It comes out of Draco in a rush. “Check in on him in his office, once a week, pretend it’s a Ministry scheme, pretend it’s you trying to seduce him away from me - I don’t care _._ But please, _please_ , check up on him. And for Merlin’s sake don’t tell him that’s what you’re doing.”

  
“What if I did choose to seduce him?”

  
“Honestly?” Draco says. “Some days I think the only thing that will keep that man alive is a live-in healer. I might even fucking thank you, in between watching my life fall apart.”

Bell looks a little shocked at that. Baring his soul comes with an awful awkward silence.   
  
“Thank you, Healer Bell,” Draco says, backing away to the door and retreating into formality. 

Bell sighs gustily and it sounds like she’s letting a touch of the anger go.   
  
“I’ll do what I can,” he hears her promise, as the door is shutting behind him.  
  
***  
When Harry finally wakes up, seven days after he portkeyed back into Draco's life, it all falls apart much more quietly than Draco expected.  
  
Harry blinks at the St. Mungo’s lights and Draco dims them for him. Then Harry sits up, and reaches for Draco with his good arm.  
  
Draco takes his husband’s hand, grasps it, wants to hold on forever. He thinks, stupidly but for the first time, that Harry must have lost his wedding ring with his left arm.  
  
“Did you have a good time at your conference?” Harry slurs out, his mouth still slow on the reflux of the spells.  
  
“You think I- You think I went to my-? With you here?” Draco is flabbergasted, can barely form the sentences. He is _pissed._  
  
“You didn’t go?” Harry sounds genuinely confused.  
  
“OF COURSE I DIDN’T GO!”  
  
Draco is yelling. A Healer pops their head through the door, and Draco lowers his voice.  
  
“Harry, I can barely _think_ when you’re gone. Let alone - like this. What would I have done at the conference?”  
  
Harry shrugs - as much as you can shrug, half-propped up in a bed. “No once can live forever.”  
  
This is it, Draco thinks. This is what falling apart is. Not crumbling, just… gone. _Done._  
  
He had done everything he could think of, but he couldn’t be the sacrifice’s husband.   
  
He always thought there would be an end, that someday Harry would realise that he did not have to track down every single bad guy on his own. He had waited for it, through years of dating, through their long engagement, their years of marriage. It has been four years since Harry became Head Auror, and it looked like he would be in it for life now.  
  
It’s funny that Draco had really believed they might get away with it all.  
  
“Are you crying?” Harry asks into their silence.  
  
Draco just shakes his head.  
  
“We can fix this,” Harry insists. “Change things. I know I’ve been too busy lately, getting hurt too. It’s just, with this one…” he trails off. Both of them know that every killer becomes ‘this one’.  
  
“You can’t change _you,”_ Draco says, because Harry Potter is a force of nature and a symbol and an enduring flame. And Harry himself has got lost somewhere within it, and Draco is just getting burnt.  
  
“I can’t do this without you,” Harry says, quietly, almost too himself. “Without knowing you’re safe.”  
  
Draco squeezes Harry’s hand tighter, wishing he could hold onto it until Harry let go of everything else. They shouldn’t be having this conversation with Harry barely awake. But Draco suddenly understands how it must have felt for Ginny, to love a hero and watch the hero give her up for the good of the world. To ‘keep her safe’, when safety wasn’t what she wanted, or needed, or even got.  
  
Harry had split with Ginny to devote himself to the greater good, but here Draco is, holding onto Harry like he might die tomorrow, and Harry is clinging back like Draco is a tether that will keep him sane.  
  
Neither of them knows how to look to each other for a comfort that isn’t mired in constant, terrifying danger.  
  
“So far,” Draco tells his husband with a deep, resolving breath, “you’ve been doing all of it without me.”


	3. Chapter 3

“Draco,” Harry says urgently, turning to face him fully and wincing as he does it.

Draco is surprised any pain can penetrate the fog of Healer’s numbing spells. He’s surprised too, that suddenly he does not want to hear this. He doesn’t want to force Harry to say something he can’t take back while lying in a mess of injuries and pain spells. He doesn’t want to fall apart with Aurors listening at the door, ready to take Harry’s statement as soon as he’s coherent.

And he realises with a jolt that Harry _shouldn’t_ be coherent. He should be addled by those pain relief spells. Instead Harry, of the unhealthily high pain tolerance, is holding himself stiffly, as if Draco could open the window and the breeze would shatter him.

“You’ve banned pain relief in your file, haven’t you?” Draco snatches his hand out of Harry’s to grab at the file; and then misses touching Harry, which is ridiculous, for a man five years married. “You really have. That’s meant to be for people who have nerve damage! Not paranoid Aurors, you self-sacrificing Moody-imitating idiot.”

Towards the end he is near shouting. There’s voices from the corridor, a muttered conversation. Harry looks embarrassed, but Draco is too tired to care.

He knows this isn’t the heart of it, but right now it feels like it sums up everything that’s wrong, that Harry signed a form to say he wanted no pain relief, even before knowing what pain he’d be in. That he probably hoped Draco would never notice.

“Harry,” Draco says, willing calm. “Why do you bloody think your whole Auror squadron is stationed outside, as I expect they are?”

Harry shrugs, then looks like he regrets it, from the way his jaw clenches and he holds his shoulders stiff after.

“So that you don’t need to be on alert.”

Harry’s smile is wry, sad, as far away from a real smile as that stump is from an arm. “They haven’t caught him yet, have they?”

Draco can’t tell Harry that he’s wrong. He overheard one of the juniors yesterday muttering _we’ll get him, Sir,_ when awkwardly sat at Harry’s bedside for the allocated ten minutes of sympathy. Which means, of course, that they haven’t yet.

So Draco takes his cue as the devoted Auror-husband. He calls out the door for one of the Aurors to floo call Weasley, who comes quick marching down the corridor within minutes. This is when Draco would usually clear out – Ministry secrets to be discussed – but he lingers at the door.

“Harry,” Draco says, before Weasley reaches them. He turns to his husband, suddenly urgent, desperate. “Harry, what if I help this time? You know I could have chosen curses as my expertise. Some of the ones he used to cause your injuries, they must have been specialist, I can find where he sourced them, I can help you catch him-”

“No.” Harry’s voice is flat. He doesn’t even try to explain. It is Draco whose voice is breaking.

And here is Weasley walking in, to enjoy it all. He and Draco make small talk for a few, drawn-out moments. Hermione and little Rose are doing well. Cannons might regain second-last-place if they win. 

He sees Weasley’s eyes draw to Harry’s left arm as they talk. Watches him figure out the answer to whether the Healers can do anything before he has to ask it.

Draco stays in the doorway.

“Malfoy,” Weasley says, once their empty small talk has slowed to silence with room to fall apart in. “Probably best if you head home, have a shower, take a break, yeah?”

Draco doesn’t say anything. Can’t bear to ask Harry.

Weasley comes towards him, pats him on the shoulder, like he needs to be shuffled out. “You’ve been cooped in this room for a while, I reckon. Best to head home, clear your head.”

Draco looks to his husband, but Harry is not even looking at him, just down at his clenching and unclenching right hand.

It’s as good as a dismissal.

Draco makes sure to leave his address with the top two curse specialists before he leaves.

He spots distinctive red hair in the lobby neat the exit; looking closer, it’s George. Draco schools himself and walks over. George knows something about losing a body part, could probably get through to Harry in a way Draco cut himself off from. But George is leaning against the visitors check-in desk, asking for where to find muggle-related mishaps. That’s not Harry’s floor – it’s three below it – but it’s also _strange,_ and it takes Draco a moment to realise why his brain is flagging this.

Because if George Weasley doesn't know every floor of St Mungo’s from his own self-inflicted injuries, Draco would eat one of George’s headless hats.

He slows down, looking around carefully now. No one else that he recognises. But _there_ – he spots a woman of Hermione’s height wearing the black running shoes she brings out in a crisis. Her hair and eyes are different and he can’t be _sure_ \- those shoes must have sold more than one pair, and muggle shoes aren’t unheard of with witches these days. But the man walking with the maybe-Hermione, who nudges her gently towards the lifts, might as well scream Kingsley Shacklebolt with that bold pattern clothing.

So disguises, but hastily picked out, haven’t thought through the details. It could be that they are all visiting Harry simultaneously, and they don’t want the Prophet’s sources to pick up on it – this place leaks like a sieve.

He should head home. Should shower, clean the rotten odour of cursed injuries out of him. Sleep in a bed rather than a chair with brusing wooden slats that he would have transfigured into something comfortable if he had felt a little more sane, a little less like punishing himself.

Instead he apparates to Andromeda’s. She lets him in with a wave of her wand, looking harassed and a little lost in her wide hallway. If his hunch is correct, she’ll have somewhere to be.

When she looks up – seems to really look at him – and asks if he can look after Teddy for the next few hours, he feels the weight of it in his stomach.

He picks up the little guy, plays with his ticklish right pinky and reassures Andromeda that he remembers Teddy’s allergies and newest favourite toy.

All the while letting it sink in:

_The Order are coming back together._

For the first time since the war.

_What the hell has Harry got himself into?_

_**_

Draco could dwell on this. Could hate them for not telling him about the threat against his husband. Could hate Harry. _Might_ hate Harry, a little bit.

Teddy takes that moment to run away, so Draco chases him into the living room, catches him, tugs him close. Listens to Teddy’s quick heartbeat. Lets it soothe his own. Draco doesn’t care about the world. He cares for Harry, and Pansy, and this little man.

And realises what an idiot he has been. Harry doesn’t want him to help, _fine._ He won’t do it as himself. He’s not much use here as Harry’s husband, anyway. Let the Order keep their crappy disguises. Draco will be unrecognisable _._


End file.
